Do you know what you are going to talk to your social media audience about next week? How much do you plan your social media content?
Choosing the right tools for your audience, your aims and your resources is, in my opinion, crucial to getting success from social media. Equally, if not more, important is knowing what you are going to say using the tools! Your content should be made up of three parts
- Your original content in which you add value to your audience.
- Content posted by others which you share to provide interest to your audience and to build relationships with the businesses whose content you are sharing.
- Replies to those you are following as relevant
Much of your original content can be created and even posted ahead of time. You should plan what you are going to say in status updates and blog entries, write the content and schedule it to be published. Not only does this have the benefit of you having a presence on social media even when work gets crazy but also allows you to proof read and double check your content before it goes out, making sure you apply the ‘So What?’ text. You can also spread the load of creating content amongst your team.
This is all very well, but this still doesn’t solve the problem about what you are going to write about…..
I suggest you brainstorm a number of topics based on questions that your audience are 
concerned about or your customers are asking you. For example, taking a web design agency, you could start with the following themes:
- Content Management systems
- Blogging
- SEO
- User Interface
- Etc.
Taking the topic of Content Management Systems, you could further break this down into:
- 6 features of a content management system
- 5 ways to tell if you need a content management system
- 4 different content management systems
- How to update your content management system
- Etc.
Taking the first topic, ‘6 features of a content management system’, think about what content you could create from this and where the content should be created. How about:
- A blog post (Blog)
- A status update to the blog post (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+)
- 6 status updates – one for each feature (Twitter, LinkedIn)
- A video showing the features using a screen recorder (YouTube)
- 6 images, each showing a feature (Facebook, Google+)
- Newsletter with a summary of the blog post linking to the full post (Newsletter)
- Etc.
In this way, you can quickly generate a variety of updates that you can spread through the week or the month giving people interesting and useful information. Remember you can repeat links to blog posts or status updates over a period of time – don’t only post once. Don’t post the same tip on all your different tools at the same time – mix it up a bit. You could even create an E-book made up of a number of blog posts and allow people to download the information in return for their e-mail address.
In this way, you can generate loads of content that can be written and scheduled in advance. You will still need to access social media to share and reply in real time – but believe me the pressure is off. Of course if things happen in the world that makes your content irrelevant – remember to change the schedule!
If you need help creating your content or scheduling your posts and managing your engagement, we offer this as a service. Contact me if you would like to know more.
I would love to know how you plan your content – do share in the comments below.